Does matter come from spirit? if so how does matter emerge from it?
Question from James Prabhu. Does matter come from spirit? If so, how does matter emerge from it? Answer.
No, matter doesn't come from spirit. Matter and spirit both come from God. And that coming from is not in a chronological sense but in ontological sense.
Chronological means it is not that a particular time God is existing and nothing else is existing. Actually God is non-different from his energies and his energies are both material and spiritual. And they all exist with God eternally.
The material energies may sometimes be manifested and sometimes be unmanifested. But they always exist. So this is a fundamental problem in those worldviews which posit that God creates something out of nothing.
How something can come from nothing? Which is what happens when say if everything was originally spiritual and matter comes from spirit then how that happens is something which is very difficult for religious ideologies to explain which posit that the world was created at a particular time. And similarly materialistic ideologies which say that consciousness, the characteristic of spirit emerges from matter also cannot explain how that happens. The Vedic wisdom tradition addresses this problem by explaining that it is not that matter has to emerge from spirit or spirit has to emerge from matter.
Both are eternal. In 7th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says in verses 4 and 5 that matter and spirit are both his energies. And the Vedic scriptures explain that both these energies are actually forever existing with him.
So what we call as the creation of the material world is not a creation ex nihilo, is not a creation from nothing but is rather a manifestation of the material energy that was earlier existing in an unmanifested form. So Krishna talks about this repeatedly in the 8th and the 9th chapters of the Bhagavad Gita where he says that this world is sometimes manifested and sometimes unmanifested. And beyond both these manifestations is the eternal manifestation which is indestructible, which he says is abode.
So in 8.20 he says So beyond this material world, he says this material world is sometimes vyakta and sometimes avyakta, sometimes manifest and sometimes unmanifest. So when what we call as creation takes place through the agency of Brahma and others then the material world becomes manifested. And when destruction happens through the agency of Shiva then the unmanifestation happens and the material world is no longer seen to us.
It is withdrawn into the body of Mahavishnu. So essentially we don't have to have any problematic intellectual gymnastics to try to visualize how spirit emerges from matter or matter emerges from spirit. Both matter and spirit in the Vedic worldview are eternal and both they are co-eternal with God.
And matter becomes unmanifest and manifest which is called as destruction and creation.